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Unfortunately for someone like me who’s not enthusiastic about photography at all and takes maybe a dozen photos a year, every time I buy a new iPhone or in thi

by oefrha 7y ago

Unfortunately for someone like me who’s not enthusiastic about photography at all and takes maybe a dozen photos a year, every time I buy a new iPhone or in this case an iPad Pro I feel like I’m wasting hundreds of bucks on a camera I’m not really gonna take advantage of.

rootusrootus 7y ago
They could delete the camera and related sensors and it would not appreciably affect the price of the tablet. The camera is probably something like 5 bucks in quantity, and I doubt the "LIDAR" sensor is particularly expensive either.
- oefrha 7y ago
  Cost of something isn’t just the parts, you forgot all the R&D, labor, and premium. iPhone 11 and 11 Pro differ by $300 and the better camera is one of the two (?) major selling points; not to mention the iPhone 11 has a pretty good camera too.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  Actually that's not true -- some quick searching reveals iPhone cameras cost $30-50, generally about 10% of the total BOM. Which means that for a ~$1,000 tablet, it would be ~$900 if it didn't have cameras. So it's not doubling it or anything... but it's not nothing. (On the other hand, the vastly lower-quality webcam cameras built into Macbooks are probably closer to the $5 you're suggesting.)
  - snazz 7y ago
    The iPad cameras in this article are significantly lower-quality than iPhone cameras, other than the LiDAR sensor. So it's definitely cheaper than the larger sensors and optics in new iPhones.
Someone 7y ago
If they built a version without cameras for the small subset of people who don’t even want a camera for FaceTime/video conferencing, chances are it would be more expensive than what you paid now. Apple would have to make separate backplanes, boxes, marketing material, etc, would have to create a separate iOS release (they couldn’t ship a camera app with the system, for example, and would have to change the UI that allows picking a photo from either storage or camera. I guess it also would break many apps. I don’t think there ever was an iOS device without a camera, so nobody is checking for its presence. For example, your banking app that wants you to take a photo of a QR code for 2FA would break.
- oefrha 7y ago
  There’s a huge chasm between no camera and pouring huge amounts of R&D into shipping a cutting edge camera every year and marketing entirely around that. I’m not sure how you jumped from my post to “a version without cameras”, as I did say I take a nonzero number of photos (mostly utility shots). One hell of a straw man.

by oefrha 7y ago

rootusrootus 7y ago

They could delete the camera and related sensors and it would not appreciably affect the price of the tablet. The camera is probably something like 5 bucks in quantity, and I doubt the "LIDAR" sensor is particularly expensive either.

oefrha 7y ago
Cost of something isn’t just the parts, you forgot all the R&D, labor, and premium. iPhone 11 and 11 Pro differ by $300 and the better camera is one of the two (?) major selling points; not to mention the iPhone 11 has a pretty good camera too.
crazygringo 7y ago
Actually that's not true -- some quick searching reveals iPhone cameras cost $30-50, generally about 10% of the total BOM. Which means that for a ~$1,000 tablet, it would be ~$900 if it didn't have cameras. So it's not doubling it or anything... but it's not nothing. (On the other hand, the vastly lower-quality webcam cameras built into Macbooks are probably closer to the $5 you're suggesting.)
- snazz 7y ago
  The iPad cameras in this article are significantly lower-quality than iPhone cameras, other than the LiDAR sensor. So it's definitely cheaper than the larger sensors and optics in new iPhones.

Someone 7y ago

If they built a version without cameras for the small subset of people who don’t even want a camera for FaceTime/video conferencing, chances are it would be more expensive than what you paid now. Apple would have to make separate backplanes, boxes, marketing material, etc, would have to create a separate iOS release (they couldn’t ship a camera app with the system, for example, and would have to change the UI that allows picking a photo from either storage or camera. I guess it also would break many apps. I don’t think there ever was an iOS device without a camera, so nobody is checking for its presence. For example, your banking app that wants you to take a photo of a QR code for 2FA would break.

oefrha 7y ago
There’s a huge chasm between no camera and pouring huge amounts of R&D into shipping a cutting edge camera every year and marketing entirely around that. I’m not sure how you jumped from my post to “a version without cameras”, as I did say I take a nonzero number of photos (mostly utility shots). One hell of a straw man.